Most Windsor taxpayers should be quite pleased with the four-year labour peace cooked up by their Add Media civic employees and city administrators.

City council should also take a big bow for the wage settlement ratified this week: they signalled in advance their determination to keep labour costs flat, so that Windsor’s years-long freeze on property taxes can continue as long as possible.

After that painful 101-day strike three years ago, the 1,500 members of CUPE Locals 543 and 82 knew that council – and taxpayers – aren’t fooling around when it comes to saving Windsor from overspending and overtaxation.

These talks weren’t the usual fake game of government-vs-union chicken, in which everybody knows the government side will give up every time. (For the latest example of the game, please see Dalton McGuinty vs Ontario school teachers).

Windsor secured the appropriate deal for its ratepayers given the city’s severely reduced circumstances. CUPE got two signing bonus years, plus two token wage increases in the one-per-cent range.

The city might justifiably even have asked for a complete wage freeze, but they got something from CUPE worth just as much: a reduction in the number of bankable sick days, from 18 days per year to nine. That will save millions of dollars over the life of the contract – almost exactly what the bonuses and wage increases are worth, in fact.

Seems fair. Most citizens of Windsor don’t want to see any worker forced to give up any wages or benefits. Only the crackpots will begrudge raises in return for cost savings that will pay for them.

Now just compare Windsor Mayor Eddie Francis’ record of financial management to the two rather miserable records of overspending by the senior levels of government.

While Windsor and CUPE have done the right thing for taxpayers by working out a sensibly frugal contract for the times, right across the street the other two levels of government and their employees continue to party with our money.

Ontario Premier McGuinty’s long list of deficits, billion-dollar “oopses” and lavish spending has been well documented. But recently Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s regime was also called out for its own rotten record.

Over the last 10 years our 375,000 federal employees have been getting wage increases roughly four times higher than taxpayers have been getting, Canada’s budget watchdog reported last week.

Per employee, the cost of federal workers has jumped from an average of $86,000 to $114,000 in only the last five years. And the cost is likely to shoot up to $129,000 only two years from now unless the Harper government takes serious steps to get the problem under control.

The rate of increase is clearly unsustainable: federal wages, pensions and benefits totalled $29 billion in 2006. By 2011, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office, that figure had grown to $42.3 billion, up 46 per cent in only five years.

Yet, regular news reports about our civil service this year have been pitiful wails out of Ottawa about how Harper’s heartless spending cuts are “gutting” the civil service, “slashing” government services, even “killing” research done by important government scientists.

Almost none of those claims are true, says Gregory Thomas, federal and Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Of the 19,000 federal jobs to be eliminated under the Harper cuts, “almost nobody is losing their jobs,” Thomas said in a recent TV interview.

Nearly all of the lost federal jobs are positions being “closed off” after the people in them were bribed into taking early retirements with buyouts the budget watchdog also calls unsustainable. Most of the departing swivel servants are in their mid-50s, and are leaving for pensions which have also been rising much faster than those of us tax slaves, the Budget Office reported.

And they don’t go quietly. Inexplicably, thousands of them seem to get very sick a few months before their retirements, Thomas says. On average, federal workers take 18 sick days per year over the course of their careers – there’s that number again – most of them “stress-related” leaves.

And most federal sick days are taken all at once in the months leading up to their retirement – almost as though federal employees have figured out a way to get a payout for the unused days in their careers.

The Harper regime might have a partial excuse for letting federal workers get away with these boondoggles between 2006 and 2011, when the Tories were a relatively powerless minority government.

But it’s time Harper & Co. pulled up their socks and got Ottawa’s massive wage bill and bloated budget deficit under control. If Windsor can do it in the cradle of organized labour, the feds should be able to do it easily.

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